Editorial | Sweet music in planned clean-up

Next to the carols signalling Jamaica’s entry into the Christmas season, perhaps the sweetest melody this newspaper has heard in recent times was Desmond McKenzie’s croaky voice talking on Tuesday about a big cleaning and garbage collection project across the island, spearheaded by the Government’s National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA).

“They (NSWMA) are employing additional sweepers and they are making sure all the areas, the public spaces across the country, are adequately swept and the garbage collected and taken to the disposal sites,” Mr McKenzie said in Parliament. “The entity will be putting on additional trucks and they have been doing so, taking into consideration the impact the rains have had on the collection of garbage over the last couple of weeks.”

Specifically, the NSWMA, Mr McKenzie disclosed, will deploy an additional 500 street-sweepers across the parishes, as well as contract 300 privately owned trucks and garbage compactors to remove the existing backlog of solid waste, and additional amounts that will accumulate over the Christmas season.

Neither Minister McKenzie nor the NSWMA (which has the dual role as the industry’s regulator and the island’s primary collector and disposer of solid waste) has said how much this effort will cost – to hire the trucks and to pay the additional staff. But assuming that these contracts will not be subject to the shenanigans that affect too many projects run by government agencies – the NSWMA has had more than its fair share of scandals – and workers are made to give value for money, the undertaking will be more than worth it.

A downside would be if the project, at least the street sweeping aspect of it, is only for the Christmas season. That would short-circuit the potential for economic and social value of a permanent scheme as the finance minister, Nigel Clarke, recognised during the 2020-21 fiscal year, when he announced an initiative to employ people mostly living along gully banks to be in charge of the upkeep of the sections of these watercourses that run through their communities.

GIVEN UP ON MANDATE

Jamaicans produce nearly a million tons of solid waste annually, 70 per cent of which is collected by the NSWMA. But in recent months, across many of the island’s towns, residents would be forgiven for feeling that the NSWMA and its subsidiaries have given up on their mandate. Garbage on the streets began to resemble the squalor associated with the Kingston and St Andrew metropolitan region, whose mayor, Delroy Williams, is a member of the NSWMA board. Shortage of equipment, insufficiency of staff, bad weather conditions and the restrictions associated with COVID-19 are among the reasons given for the haphazard collection of waste.

Such arguments, of course, are unacceptable from a public health perspective. The policymakers who advance them and allow the situation to persist may be ignorant of the contribution that community squalor makes to the country’s crisis of social dysfunction, and of crime and violence. In essence, they turn on its head the essential logic of Minister Clarke’s gully initiative.

Indeed, this newspaper has long argued that a not insignificant part of Jamaica’s problem is its consistent failure to do the little, and often relatively inexpensive things and get them right – like sweeping the streets, trimming the verges, cleaning the drains, and collecting the garbage. These failures are particularly manifest in inner-city communities where availability of, and access to, social services and law and order is sporadic, if not collapsed. Grime and squalor, social scientists say, lend to people’s sense of alienation, providing fuel for the dysfunction that feeds crime. Yet, as Dr Clarke pointed out with respect to the people who live on gully banks, most Jamaicans who are deprived of basic services “pay taxes, too”.

Further, not only do clean communities cause people to feel better about themselves, and of where they live, productively employed individuals are less likely to be available recruits for gangs and criminality. Furthermore, the earnings of people employed under schemes like the one announced by Minister McKenzie, and Dr Clarke’s gully project, represent important income to these workers. Additionally, in the hands of relatively poor people, with little savings, it is high-velocity money that helps to drive economic activity.

FISCALLY SUSTAINABLE

Yet, the budgetary outlay is sufficiently small – workers, we suspect, are to be paid not far outside the range of the minimum wage – to be fiscally sustainable. Indeed, the salaries of a handful of employees in the central civil service, say, could pay for tons of Mr McKenzie’s sweepers.

When Dr Clarke announced his gully/clean-up initiative last year, he promised that “specially trained workers will do foot patrol of the town to clear these at specified times throughout the day. They will also clear the streets of any loose garbage dropped by pedestrians”. There has been no accounting of that project, which, if it went according to plan, might have prevented the crisis of garbage that is evident today. In other words, properly run projects of the types outlined is a win for Jamaica, at a small cost.

Some people, do doubt, will be wary. For these schemes have echoes of Michael Manley’s much-ridiculed Crash Programme of the 1970s, whose weakness, in those ideologically torrid times, was poor oversight. But Shirley Williams, the manager of the NSWMA’s predecessor, Metropolitan Parks and Markets, demonstrated in the 1980s that employees can be made to deliver – that our cities, at least Kingston, could be kept clean. It can happen again.